Full Circle: Twin Checkout 05-05

Unless you’ve previously owned or flown something very much like the new airplane you’ve just acquired, getting a new airplane means you now need to get yourself up to speed from a piloting point of view.

Theoretically, it can be easier to move up along a single brand-name line of equipment so that many elements of the basic design criteria in your new airplane are similar to what you used to fly, but that isn’t always the case, either. Save for the marque on the airframe, a Piper Navajo has very little in common with a Piper Tri-Pacer, and a Cessna 414 can hardly be considered as anything beyond a very distant offspring of a Cessna 172.

When my airplane partner and I put our totally tricked-out light twin up for sale (Flyer, March 2005), we were quite pleased that the telephone began to ring just two days after the advertising became public.